Scrappy and Keep It are designed for different purposes, with Scrappy for collecting information from apps and the web, and Keep It a notebook and document organizer that fully integrates with the Finder and Files app.

In short, if you want to organize files, write notes with a full suite of formatting features, create and edit text files, scan documents, archive emails, or edit files in other apps, then choose Keep It. For primarily saving and searching text, images and web links, choose Scrappy.

Where the two apps overlap, they typically take different approaches to best perform those tasks. What follows is a more detailed explanation of those differences.

Design

Scrappy is designed for saving and browsing notes, links and images, with a single window showing large thumbnails that open into a view where you can swipe through everything. On Mac, you can drag pretty much anything from other apps to Scrappy’s Drop Shelf, and add lists and notes as destinations there too.

Keep It is designed for editing and organizing documents and other textual content. With its three-column expanded layout on Mac and iPad, the main window shows the full hierarchy of your library, and the list is detailed and customizable. Notes can also be opened in their own windows for editing, and other items either in windows or their original apps. Keep It for Mac also provides Compact Mode, which reduces the app to a single column for use alongside other apps while still providing its full functionality, similar to Slide Over on iPad.

Storage

Keep It makes its library structure available in the Finder on Mac and Files app on iOS, and fully integrates with the file system, so that you can add, edit, rename, move, tag and remove its files and folders in any app, and see those changes reflected in Keep It. Consequently, Keep It works almost exclusively with standard file formats, with notes an exception to support features not available in RTF (alternatively, Keep It can be set to create rich text, plain text, or Markdown files by default).

Keep It’s files-based approach brings many benefits, but also imposes constraints: the names of files and folders must be unique within their containing folders, certain characters are disallowed, and extensions are required to identify each file’s type across platforms, although these extensions can be hidden. Names of items in Keep It reflect what is seen in the Finder / Files app.

Scrappy, on the other hand, is entirely self-contained, and offers more flexibility: names don’t need to be unique or conform to conventions, items can belong to multiple lists or none, and the limitations imposed by standard formats are not a concern. On Mac, you can open files in other apps and edit them in place if the other app supports that, but not on iPad and iPhone, which would require Files app integration to make that possible. Scrappy can still export everything as folders of files in standard formats that any good app can understand.

Neither Keep It nor Scrappy impose a limit on the volume of data you can add to them; this is only constrained by local or iCloud storage.

Notes

Notes in Keep It provide features more commonly found in word processors, including full access to fonts, colors and paragraph settings, and the ability to create custom styles that encompass all those things, along with a live word count and other text statistics. Keep It preserves the original formatting of imported text, and provides the means to clean it up when desired. Attachments can be opened and edited in other apps on Mac, and on iPad and iPhone you can add editable sketches to notes too.

Notes in Scrappy are for collecting text from various sources, using fixed styles and limited formatting choices to ensure the text remains clean and consistent. Scrappy offers a choice of showing links as previews or clickable text. Scrappy can also show thumbnails for attachments other than PDFs and images. Attachments in Scrappy notes cannot be edited in place, but you can save them or open copies in other apps.

Both apps also provide text highlighting, checklists and horizontal dividers, as well as the ability to lock (encrypt) the contents of the note with a password that only you know. 

Web Links

When you add a web link to Scrappy, it saves relevant information about the link, including the site icon, a featured image, short description and article text, when available, then presents the link in the most appropriate way. It’s also possible to edit that link metadata, trim article text and images, and optionally save the original page for offline viewing.

As an app that primarily works with files in standard formats, Keep It offers a variety of ways to save web links: as just the link in a Web Internet Location file, as a Web Archive, or as a PDF. Those PDFs can either be paginated (as though printed) or in a single-page format that more closely resembles the original page. Alternatively, both Web Archives and PDFs can be saved in a minimal format, much like Reader mode, with text and an optional featured image, when possible.

Both Keep It and Scrappy provide a Share extension for adding links to the app from within Safari and other apps. There you can also add tags and choose a destination list or note.

Text Files

Keep It can create and edit rich and plain text files, and create, edit and preview Markdown files, and you can choose to use these formats by default instead of Keep It’s notes format. Keep It can also create items from stationery, which can be templates or empty files of any kind. 

Scrappy can only preview rich and plain text files, but can convert them to editable notes. 

Mail Messages

Keep It can import and work with mail message files, including their attachments, and provides downloadable workflows and scripts to help automate this process for Mail on Mac. 

Scrappy has no support for mail messages.

Scanned Documents

Keep It can import from a scanner on Mac or using the document camera on iPad and iPhone, as well as perform OCR on those scans, and can remove and rotate PDF pages. 

Scrappy includes none of these features.

Other Formats

Both Keep It and Scrappy can preview PDFs, images, web pages, movies and sounds, as well as third-party formats with Quick Look. However, on iOS, Scrappy cannot show Quick Look previews inline, as that would interfere with its swipe navigation.

Conversion

Both Keep It and Scrappy can convert text files and web links to notes, and other files to attachments on notes. Keep It can also convert mail messages to notes, and merge multiple items into a single note.

Encryption

Keep It can encrypt any file with a password that only you know. Scrappy only supports this for notes.

Organizing

Scrappy can organize items with hierarchical lists and color-coded tags. Items can belong to multiple lists or none at all. Scrappy doesn’t require you to organize anything, and can show lists for each category of item: notes, documents, images, web links, movies, etc. Some of these lists can also be customized to include other relevant types (for example, the Movies list can also show audio files).

In Keep It, you can organize items with hierarchical folders, bundles (which can collect items from various locations without moving them), color-coded labels, and tags, and you can see the corresponding files, folders and tags in the Finder or Files app.

Keep It has special lists to show unfiled items and items with no label, and its Tag Filter can be used to view items by combinations of tags, or items that are untagged. Keep It also provides Quick File, to file an item using a keyboard-driven interface.

In Keep It you can add searchable comments and a source URL to items, and edit items’ added, created and modified dates.

Both Scrappy and Keep It can make items favorites for quick access. Keep It can also make lists favorites, and show them in the Favorites Bar on Mac, and prominently in various places on iPad and iPhone. 

Search

Keep It and Scrappy have similar search capabilities with the ability to find the textual content of all notes, rich and plain text files, saved web pages and PDFs. On Mac, both apps can also search the content of other formats thanks to Spotlight. Keep It also searches the content of attachments on notes, rich text documents and mail messages, while Scrappy only searches attachments on notes.

Both apps show suggestions when searching, and these can help you find items by name, tags, content, date, kind, and source URL, as well as by their attachments, checklists, etc. 

Both apps provide text recognition for images and scanned PDFs, including attachments, and both apps also classify images (e.g. as screenshots, drawings, etc) and the prominent features in them (animals, vehicles, etc), and will find those when searching by content, but only Scrappy includes search suggestions and smart list rules for specifically finding images that way. 

Both apps provide a way to save the current search to the sidebar. In Keep It, these are called Saved Searches, and Smart Lists in Scrappy.

iCloud

When using iCloud, both apps can remove local downloads to save space, but Scrappy always keeps notes and web links downloaded, because it dynamically generates thumbnails for those based on current system appearance settings, and storing the thumbnails would use more space than the actual content in most cases. Scrappy always shows thumbnails for images and movies too, but a placeholder for other items that have not been downloaded. 

Keep It is designed to mitigate the impact large document libraries would have on local storage, helped by the fact most content is expected to be textual. On Mac, Keep It downloads all items by default, but on iPad or iPhone it does not. Keep It’s list view doesn’t show thumbnails unless required, then only downloads them on demand and stores them temporarily. On Mac, when automatic downloads are disabled, the system will also play a part in determining which files are kept around, depending on available space, system requirements, etc.

Keep It allows folders and items to be shared via iCloud with other Keep It users. Scrappy has no support for iCloud sharing.

Automation

Both Keep It and Scrappy support AppleScript on Mac, and Shortcuts support on Mac, iPad and iPhone. Scrappy’s shortcut actions are limited to adding content to its library and appending content to notes, while Keep It provides a full suite of actions.

Keep It also provides support for x-callback-urls across platforms, and Automator actions on Mac. In addition, because Keep It makes its files available in the Finder and Files app, you can perform additional automations that way.